Mr. Evan Cullen:

It relates to a recommendation from Europe and all the large safety organisations about having safety teams, whereby everybody sits around a table and discusses how they could make the infrastructure safer. One such safety team, on which IALPA had a seat, is called the local runway safety team at Dublin Airport.

IALPA pointed out that Dublin Airport was not adhering to the recommendations of the ICAO regarding tailwinds on the main runway. Commercial interests wanted to maintain the main, westerly runway despite the wind and allow higher limits to be applied before they would change the runway, purely for commercial reasons. We believe that, because IALPA insisted on adhering to the international recommendation on tailwinds, we were then excluded from the meetings thenceforth, and we have never been let back into them.

As members will see in the correspondence, we complained bitterly to the IAA about this behaviour, stating we had been excluded from a safety team because of a commercial motivation at the airport, and it has done nothing about it.